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Satoshi’s Vision – Get Paid For Your Content

The Satoshi’s Vision Conference continued this week with a talk from Ryan X. Charles, the CEO and Co-founder of Yours (yours.org).

Yours is a platform which uses Bitcoin Cash to pay people for ‘creating good content, finding good content and commenting on good content’. In his presentation, Charles explains that this format is the way forward for Bitcoin Cash and that platforms such as Yours will spearhead the movement towards Bitcoin Cash becoming a key part of the global economy. In his presentation, Charles states:

“We think the way to make Bitcoin Cash mainstream is to make it really easy for anyone, anywhere to earn Bitcoin Cash for working in the global economy on the internet”.

This means Yours wish to recognise talented authors and web users by offering them a service through which they can trade Bitcoin Cash to view texts, articles, and publications. In doing this, not only are talents recognised, but, more importantly, Bitcoin Cash is offered a path into the mainstream, giving more and more people access to it.

How does Yours work?

Charles discusses options that are available to users of Yours, such options include erecting paywalls over content that an author believes is worth paying for, a more orthodox method of generating income. Moreover, Charles also discusses the voting element built into Yours. I find this especially interesting, essentially here, readers can earn Bitcoin Cash by upvoting content, when this happens the user must pay 25¢, this is split between the person who wrote the content and the other users who had upvoted the article prior to the current user. The beauty of this is that if numerous people go on to upvote the content after you, you can profit. Here’s an example provided by the Yours website:

Suppose Alice makes a post. Bob votes on her post and pays 25¢ to Alice. Then Carol votes on the post and pays 25¢: 12.5¢ goes to Alice and 12.5¢ goes to Bob. Then Dave votes on the post and pays 25¢: 8.3¢ goes to Alice, 8.3¢ goes to Bob, and 8.3¢ goes to Carol. The first quarter of voters always profit.

This means if content is universally good, more and more people can profit from a small 25¢ investment.

Charles also highlights other methods for earning within the Yours platform, these include applying a fee to users who wish to add comments to content, theoretically only those with something relevant to say will comment on content if they must pay to do so, therefore spam and trolling will be reduced. Users can also tip each other for content and comments that they believe are relevant. Essentially, Charles wants to foster an environment through which real users can upload and engage with real content, free from ‘fake news’ and trolls, Charles believes small Bitcoin Cash incentives are the way to do this.

Ultimately, as previously mentioned, integrating Bitcoin Cash into this is only going to make the currency more accessible and a part of the mainstream, which is certainly a good thing.

Charles, refers to Yours as a solution, a way to “build payments into the internet so its possible to earn or pay for anything” it’s a “design incentive that encourages high quality, well-curated content”.

Finally, to conclude his talk, Charles touched upon the evidence to back up his ideas and truthfully, he does bring up some interesting findings, namely one in which an experiment on tipping within Yours was carried out to see if encouraging users to tip would increase the volume of Bitcoin Cash transactions, the findings can be found here:

Overall, Charles presented a very optimistic notion. I suppose if enough people got involved with this format of content curation and validation, Bitcoin Cash will flourish within these areas. What’s more, as this idea develops, what’s to stop other currencies being used as an incentive? It’s still early days but I agree with Charles, this is a great way to get Bitcoin Cash into the mainstream.